There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion about “Help 2.0” in which users will be able to eas­i­ly com­ment on the con­tent you’ve writ­ten in a help topic.

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Communication’s Inter­com mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished an arti­cle titled “Under­stand­ing the Help 2.0 Rev­o­lu­tion.” I have to admit that I thought the arti­cle con­tained some excit­ing ideas: for the first time tech­ni­cal writ­ers may have an online dia­log with our read­ers using tech­nolo­gies like web posts and commenting.

In the same vein, author and teacher Clay Shirky wrote a book called Cog­ni­tive Sur­plus. In it, he asserts that North Amer­i­cans are watch­ing less tele­vi­sion and are embrac­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies like blogs and wikis. Col­lec­tive­ly, we can pool our efforts to achieve amaz­ing results. Just look at the colos­sal effort of web sites like Wikipedia.

But I think we have a long way to go. For all this talk of col­lab­o­ra­tion, usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen argues that only one per­cent of peo­ple con­tribute to a site, nine per­cent are inter­mit­tent con­trib­u­tors, and 90 per­cent just read the con­tent. So if Nielsen is right, most peo­ple are still being pas­sive. Doesn’t sound that dif­fer­ent to watch­ing television.

Here’s an excerpt from Nielsen’s web site:

“Blogs have even worse par­tic­i­pa­tion inequal­i­ty than is evi­dent in the 90–9‑1 rule that char­ac­ter­izes most online com­mu­ni­ties. With blogs, the rule is more like 95–5‑0.1. Inequal­i­ties are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurk­ers. Accord­ing to Wikipedi­a’s “about” page, it has only 68,000 active con­trib­u­tors, which is 0.2% of the 32 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors it has in the U.S. alone.”

Grant­ed, Nielsen’s research is about five years old. Maybe more peo­ple are now con­tribut­ing? But I doubt it’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly more.

Here‘s the bot­tom line. If you’ve cre­at­ed a web site or help sys­tem that incor­po­rates Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies like com­ment­ing, don’t be sur­prised if you ini­tial­ly receive a trick­le of respons­es from your read­ers. My bet is that tech­ni­cal writ­ers will need to reg­u­lar­ly pro­mote their help sys­tems or web sites to encour­age more read­ers to post their feed­back. If you want an online dia­log with cus­tomers, it‘s not just a mat­ter of “build it and they will come.”